Front Cover Develpment

Here is where I will be updating the research, the progress in the making of my magazine's front cover.

Here are some magazine cover references that I use as inspiration and ideas to build my own magazine covers. I follow a conventions for the Keris magazine where 

First I want to decide what atmosphere on the magazine I want to set. I decided to make it formal so I set the color to be dark and gloomy to create sense of seriousness and tense in the cover page. At first I want it to be a formal magazine, but this color is just too dark and gloomy, I am afraid that it will discourage my readers as they may also think that this magazine may holds dark-themed topics which is too complicated to understand. I want my readers to read my magazine in a curious yet open minded mood and relax while learning the culture, in a way that I don't want people felt pressures/to be forced when reading or understanding the culture.

Too yellow-ish, lacks of color variations.

This is pale and the atmosphere for this is a bit gloomy.

This is a good-decent color, sets a happy mood for the audiences.

This color is too gloomy, pale and too gray, the atmosphere of the picture would be good if it's a magazine about mourning loved one's demise. This will make the reader wondering what will be the mood of the magazine, might discourage some people because they're too confuse with the mood I am trying to set here.

And here is the final color I choose after a few trial of trying color combinations. The collaboration of yellow and orange sets a joyful mood for the reader, making them to feel "warmth" and "comfortable" when reading the magazine. Not only, the color also imitates a sunset atmosphere where Bali is the most popular for the sunset scenery, especially on most of the beaches, with this it strengthen the Balinese vibes to the reader when they're planning to take it back home to their home country.

I am starting to add the masthead for the front cover page. I uses the outline red for the sub heading to indicate how determine I am in this project. The font color white symbolizes purity which is the philosophy of the keris itself, made from purifying minerals from unwanted object. The type face I am using ended with line strokes, as this type face means traditionality, classic, and formality. 

I added orange-yellowish gradient box to separate the title with the rest of the elements of the cover pages, and to make the tittle stands out. I also start adding the coverlines. 

Here my teacher said that the background of the Keris is too bright for the writing to be seen as I am also using bright color for it. So I decided to make the background darker by overlaying black rectangle and decreasing the transparency of the picture. My friend also said that the Keris needed to be more stands out, so I have the idea to crop the Keris only and place it on the front of the background. Here I also added the issue date, the price and the barcode 

Here I started using the 1/3rd of the page rules, where it is stated that in the 1/3 of the pages we put the important information on the 1/3 part. And that is why my barcode, price, issue date, and the author name (me) is on the left side.

My friend said that the Keris needed to be shown more and make it the "main star" of the front cover. In order to follow his suggestion, I have resized the picture and make it a lot bigger. And now it appears more stands out than before.

From this point, a friend of me told me how to use guidelines on canva so I removed my temporary borderline as it is no longer needed. And the effect for that is as you can see the coverline is now is in line with each other. I also remove my name from the author as I don't think it will suit and I just don't like it to be there.

In this version, I edited the color and the quality of the keris picture a little bit as well a s making the picture less blurry as one of my friend said that the picture is so blurry and i tried my best to use an online picture enhancer remove blurs, and I am quite satisfied with the color.

During the making of my double page spread, I realize the flow of the content doesn't only revolves on a niche district which is previously outlined as Bali, but rather I discuss the culture not just in Bali but also in the Java Province. And for that I decided to change the sub-masthead from The True Nature of Balinese Art to The True nature of Indonesian Art as I am representing more than one region in this case. And this is my final front cover page.

FINAL DESIGN